During normal use of a tire, its sidewalls may suffer considerable wear, damage or general deterioration due to contact with roadway objects and curbs. Also, rubber inherently deteriorates due to oxidation or an ozone reaction that tends to produce cracks or checking in the sidewall surfaces. Over a period of time such cracks become worse, particularly when the tire is used in a moisture environment. To counteract such sidewall wear and degradation in tires it has been proposed to apply a new layer of rubber to the sidewall area. Heretofore, the addition or replacement of sidewall rubber to tires was accomplished by means of rigid molding apparatus using uncured rubber. Examples of such sidewall molding apparatus is found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,574,171, 3,232,816 and 3,492,180. In these devices, each molding apparatus must be carefully sized to conform to this particular tire being processed. In addition to the fact that such prior sidewall molding apparatus was highly expensive, it had the further disadvantage that the procedure for using it to prepare a tire and complete the molding process required considerable time and labor.